AlterNet.org: Shay O&#039;Reillyhttps://www.alternet.org/authors/shay-oreilly
enA Guide to Resisting Debt -- For Students and the Rest of Ushttps://www.alternet.org/guide-resisting-debt-students-and-rest-us
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">A new manual from the Strike Debt campaign offers comprehensive advice for those struggling with student loan, medical and other kinds of debt.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>If you want a print copy of Occupy Wall Street offshoot Strike Debt’s first publication, you’ll have to wait. The 5,000 first-run copies of the Debt Resistors' Operations Manual vanished into backpacks, purses, jacket pockets, and tote bags over Occupy Wall Street’s anniversary weekend, and until a second printing, the Occupy guide to debt in America <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/105887484/Occupy-Wall-Street-Strike-Debt-The-Debt-Resistors-Operations-Manual">can only be acquired online</a>.<br /><br />The guide has 122 pages of information about the vagaries of debt. Consider it a manual to the surprisingly secretive world of financial trouble, where more and more Americans—and especially students—are disoriented and lost. <br /><br />Nearly 20 percent of American households have student loan debt; last year, student loan debt outpaced credit card debt for the first time in American history. Graduates who find themselves with incredible financial burdens and few job opportunities face isolation and uncertainty. Though burgeoning student debt played a key role in its inception, the book takes a broader approach, castigating the current economic system for forcing poor and middle-class people to increasingly rely on debt to finance daily necessities.</p><p>“The manual developed out of early conversations we had about mutual aid,” Occupy Student Debt Campaign member and organizer Pam Brown told Campus Progress. “This is just the first thing we're doing in terms of mutual aid and support to help people who find themselves indebted, to provide a systemic analysis and also simultaneously that support for people who are really, truly suffering.”</p><p>Brown, deeply in debt from her first attempt at graduate school, calls herself the victim of a “predatory situation.” It’s one that the manual describes in detail:</p><blockquote><p>Neoliberal policy-making has transferred the financial burden [of higher education] onto individual students. This means your future salary will be used to pay back the debts you got stuck with to prepare yourself for employability in the first place. Having to pay for education through debt is a form of indenture. And unlike traditional forms of indenture, it can take a lifetime to regain your freedom…</p><p>Chances are your university financial aid officials are in cahoots with private lenders. A 2006 investigation by the New York State Attorney General’s Office concluded that the business relationship between lenders and university officials amounted to an “unholy alliance.”</p></blockquote><p>And other forms of credit are no less exploitative, according to the manual. It contains comprehensive advice for people facing down student loan default (find out the loan servicer, be aware of illegal practices, know your rights), but also for those struggling with medical debt, credit card debt, and housing debt; there are form letters for challenging credit reports and collection attempts. Poor, middle-class, black, or white, “debt binds the 99%,” says the <a href="http://strikedebt.org/">Strike Debt web site</a>. And through conversations and forums, people involved with Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Theory began to make plans.</p><p><a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/169760/occupy-20-strike-debt">Activists have undertaken several projects</a>: a student debt resistance pledge (which commits signers to taking action if and when the project reaches critical mass); a “rolling jubilee” to buy up medical debt and forgive it; a compendium of stories; and another 10,000 copies of the manual, this version with chapters on sovereign and tax debt. All of these head toward one lofty dream, shared by everyone involved with the Strike Debt campaign. </p><p>Here it is, from its deep roots in the Bible and the work of anthropologist and Occupy Wall Street visionary David Graeber: A debtors’ union, and, eventually, a Jubilee—complete debt forgiveness.</p><p>Brown acknowledges it’s a radical, far-off goal. But if the conditions were right, she says, “it would also be an acknowledgment that there's something very broken with our system.” It is this system that the Debt Resistors' Operations Manual hopes to confront, by giving people the education they need to fight back—and a bit of inspiration, too.</p><p>“We are morally obligated to find a way to stop this system rather than continuing to perpetuate it,” the manual’s introduction reads. “To the financial establishment of the world, we have only one thing to say: We owe you nothing. To our friends, our families, our communities, to humanity and to the natural world that makes our lives possible, we owe you everything.”</p> Wed, 03 Oct 2012 06:50:00 -0700Shay O'Reilly, Campus Progress720847 at https://www.alternet.orgEducationOccupy Wall Streeteducationstudent loan debtoccupy wall streetStrike Debthigher educationOccupy Student Debt15 Year Old Gay Student Killed, "Gay Panic" Used as Defensehttps://www.alternet.org/story/152370/15_year_old_gay_student_killed%2C_%22gay_panic%22_used_as_defense
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<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The slaying of Lawrence King has alarmed gay rights activists and led to demands that middle schools do more to educate youngsters about discrimination.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
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<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>Prosecutors are scrambling to arrange another trial for a teenager who shot and killed a gay classmate after the first <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/09/01/national/main20100722.shtml">ended in a mistrial</a>.</p>
<p>Seventeen-year-old Brandon McInerney, then 14, shot 15-year-old Larry King twice in the head in the middle of class. <a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/09/gay-slaying-jury.html">According to a friend’s testimony</a>, McInerney decided to bring a gun to school after King regaled in him the hallway with, “What’s up, baby?” He pulled the trigger shortly after hearing that King was considering changing his name to Latisha. </p>
<p>Jurors had no doubt that McInerney killed King.</p>
<p>What they could not determine was the degree of the offense — was it manslaughter or homicide? The disagreement stems from the defense’s argument that McInerney was responding to persistent advances from King.</p>
<p>Defense lawyers argued that King had embarrassed McInerney repeatedly with sexual advances, painting a picture of McInerney as an intelligent young man abused by his family and harassed at school. They also brought in classmates and teachers to testify that King’s effeminate behavior and dress was distracting to other students.</p>
<p>The argument has been seen by LGBT advocates as <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0721-gay-panic-20110721,0,6004986.story">a variant on the “gay panic” defense</a>, in which extreme revulsion at gay overtures inspires a momentary state of lesser moral responsibility, akin to a temporary insanity defense. Such a defense has played a role in more than 45 cases nationwide, according to Equality California.</p>
<p>In a University of California—Berkeley Law Review article [<a href="http://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/42-2_Lee.pdf">PDF</a>], George Washington University law professor Cynthia Lee wrote that the “gay panic” defense has been frequently used to reduce sentences in the killings of gay and transgender people, even without backing from psychological authorities.</p>
<p>But there is no data supporting a mental disorder that would respond specifically to homosexual advances.</p>
<p>“Gay panic seems to stem from a specific construction of masculinity, one that values heterosexism and violence as traits of the masculine and implicitly rejects homoerotic desire,” Lee wrote in the law review article.</p>
<p>Despite this, the defense psychologist claimed that McInerney was in a dissociative state when he shot King—invoking shades of a diminished capacity defense, along with the more common “provocation” defense.</p>
<p>Diminished capacity, in one variant, reduces murder charges to manslaughter because the defendant is not in the proper mindset required for premeditation. California <a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/background/insane/capacity.html">abolished the diminished capacity defense</a> in 1982, following its successful use in the infamous Moscone-Milk assassination trial in which Dan White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter rather than homicide.</p>
<p>With the abolition of diminished capacity, provocation remained the touchstone for the defense.</p>
<p>“Under the provocation doctrine, a defendant charged with murder can be convicted of the lesser offense of voluntary manslaughter if the jury finds that the defendant was actually and reasonably provoked into a heat of passion,” Lee wrote.</p>
<p>Many jurors agreed that King’s advances constituted provocation: Seven of twelve voted to convict McInerney of voluntary manslaughter (and thus find him not guilty of murder). The other five jurors voted to convict McInerney of first- or second-degree murder. </p>
<p>But the provocation defense not only excuses violent homophobia, it also reifies society’s construction of homosexuality as an aberrant condition; a provocation argument places the blame on the failings of society rather than the actions of an individual.</p>
<p>While McInerney was very young—and possibly should not have been tried as an adult for a crime he committed at age 14—the law must hold individuals to a higher standard than their frequently intolerant milieu.</p>
<p>The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network released <a href="http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/news/record/2790.html">a statement</a>late last week following the mistrial verdict:</p>
<p>This was always destined to be a case with little resolution and no winners, whatever the verdict. The central facts remain the same: homophobia killed Larry King and destroyed Brandon McInerney’s life, and adults failed both young men because of their own inability to deal forthrightly and compassionately with the multiple challenges they each faced.</p>
<p>Prosecutors <a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2016094322_apusgaystudentkilled.html">will ask for</a> a new trial in an Oct. 5 hearing. It’s uncertain whether they will drop some charges or whether the trial will be moved down to the juvenile court system.</p>
<p>Until then, the case serves as a lightning rod for LGBT activists, representing a new debate over how schools deal with gender and sexual expression and a new face of “gay panic.”</p>
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<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->The slaying of Lawrence King, 15, who was killed by a classmate because he was gay, has alarmed gay rights activists and led to demands that middle schools do more to educate youngsters about discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. </div></div></div>Sun, 11 Sep 2011 12:00:01 -0700Shay O'Reilly, Campus Progress667704 at https://www.alternet.orgLGBTQLGBTQEducationlgbtmurdergay panic